digital image

I really do struggle with my landscape photography in and around Encounter Bay on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula of South Australia, even though I do a lot of scoping for it. I struggle in the sense of having both a lots of doubts the value of this working and a lack of confidence in what I am doing —with both the coastal work and the roadside vegetation. So I don’t get very far with working the Fleurieuscapes project as I am not sure what I am doing with it.

I only have confidence in the abstraction side of this photographic project. The work process is now routine and I am quite comfortable with it. I make a digital study of the object, sometimes convert the colour digital file to a black and white one, and then spend some time assessing the image for possibilities for a 5×4 photo session. Is it worth doing? If so, what is the best way to approach this? This is an example of the work process –some granite rocks on the beach at Petrel Cove.

granite study for 5×4

I have sat on this image for a couple of months at least. In fact I scoped it a year ago and I’d left it sitting on the computer. I re-scopped it earlier this year when I was walking around exploring Petrel Cove whilst on a poodlewalk. I remembered that I had previously photographed this bit of rock and that I wasn’t happy with what I had done, but I had thought that it had possibilities for a black and white 5×4 photoshoot using the baby Sinar (F2). So I re-scoped it. Continue Reading…

The Coorong in South Australia is basically a string of saltwater lagoons sheltered from the Southern Ocean by the sand dunes of the Younghusband Peninsula. It is still largely seen as a pristine wilderness rather than an edge land. Nature from this perspective is a by-word for “wilderness areas”.

The Coorong is identified as a National Park, which is then reduced to a pristine wilderness that is a sanctuary for many species of birds, animals and fish. It is held to be a pristine wilderness (an elsewhere beyond human culture and society), despite the existence of walking trails; the waters of the Coorong being a popular venue for recreational and commercial fishers; and it being a remote space where we go to in our SUV’s on weekends and public holidays. The idea of wilderness area is a social/political construction as not all parts of the Coorong are a national park or a pristine wilderness.

The concept of nature underpinning the idea of the Coorong as a pristine wilderness means that it is seen as a self-contained, harmonious set of internal self-regulating relations that always return to harmony and balance so long as they aren’t perturbed by humankind. Because nature is seen as harmoniously self-regulating, any technological intervention in nature is seen as inviting harm, disaster and catastrophe.

This conception of nature as a pristine wilderness goes back to the Romantics, who constructed nature as offering a respite from the transgressions of so-called civilised European society then undergoing the initial phases of capitalist industrialisation. Nature is seen as sacrosanct and is venerated. Nature as “over there,” somehow separate from our daily lives, is then set on a pedestal.

at the salt site

The next step is to argue that the ultimate cause of our ecological problems is modern technology, Cartesian subjectivity, within which we are abstract beings somehow outside nature, who can manipulate nature, dominate nature. Nature is an object of our manipulation and exploitation. Modernity is based on a hard and fast distinction between Nature and Culture, where the two domains are to be thought as entirely separate and distinct. Continue Reading…

The picture below of Lady Bay at a particular moment in time is an outtake from a submission to a photo competition with respect to the landscape of the western Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. What was different, and significant, about this competition from a number of other competitions of contemporary art is that it was centrally premised on submitting a series of one photo of each of the four seasons over 1 year period.

Lady Bay

The significance of a series of 4 photos is that it breaks away from the entrenched tradition of a single classic analog image in a specific medium in which the specific aspects of indexical relations—–that is, concepts like objectivity, immediacy and truth——continue to inform how we, as readers, interact with images, what we expect from them and how they are performed. Yet the emerging world of networked technologies has transformed, if not ruptured, photography’s traditional boundaries. The value of the image now comes from being online, and on the image being spread and shared; on it being circulated and adapted as it moves through various online platforms.Continue Reading…